With the fast growth of virtualized data centers, and companies
like Google, Amazon and Facebook, it's easy to forget how much is
built on open-source components, aka commodity software. In
a very real way open-source has enabled the huge explosion of
commodity hardware, the fast growth of the internet itself, and
now the further acceleration through cloud services, cloud
infrastructure, and virtualization of data centers.

Your typical internet stack and application now stands on the
shoulders of tens of thousands of open source developers and
projects. Let's look at a few of them.

If you're headhunting a cloud computing expert, specifically
someone who knows Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2, you'll want
to have a battery of questions to ask them to assess their
knowledge. As with any technical interview focus on
concepts and big picture. As the 37Signals folks
like to say "hire for attitude, train for skill".
Absolutely!

1. Explain Elastic Block Storage? What type of
performance can you expect? How do you back it up?
How do you improve performance?

Some of the high profile companies affected by Amazon's April 2011 outage could have
recovered had they kept a backup of their entire site outside of
the cloud. With any hosting provider, managed traditional
data center or cloud provider, alternate backups are always a
good idea. A MySQL logical backup and/or incremental backup
can be copied regularly offsite or to an …

Deploying in the Amazon cloud is touted as a
great way to achieve high scalability while paying only for the
computing power you use. How do you get the best scalability from
the technology?

1. Use Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling is a unique feature of cloud computing and Amazon's
EC2 offering. Setup a load balancer and a couple of webservers
for your application as you normally would. Design your webserver
based on a template AMI that you'll reuse over and over. Then
setup auto-scaling and set thresholds based on the …

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